DOES ENGLISH HAVE FUTURE TENSE?

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 7:27 am

I agree with lolwhites latter point, the dubious central semantic meaning of will is also a problem, and as I said, I also avoid the term "future tense".

I do not agree with the statement about there being no universally accepted link between tense and time. Academics are not free to alter the language as they see fit. People who have no respect for a commonly held definition of a word cannot communicate or debate effectively.

I think what exasperates me and Revel though, is when people get so wrapped up in this stuff that they seem to forget that English speakers do talk about the future, and unlike Chinese people, they do not usually do so in a plain and unaltered manner.

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 2:50 pm

But what if a significant number of people find a definition to be unsatisfactory? To look no further, this message board is replete with examples of the same verb form referring to different times and the same times being referred to by different tenses. So, to move the debate on we may well have to revise our definitions and terminologies.

Try the following exercise which I regularly give to my students:

Take the following sentences and put them into groups depending on what time they refer to:
1) NOW
2) BEFORE NOW
3) AFTER NOW
4) DON'T KNOW/OTHER

The Earth orbits the Sun.
The bus leaves in five minutes.
The bus leaves every day at midday.
(On a letter) I am writing to inform you that your account is overdrawn.
Are you going to Tom's party tonight?
(You see a friend walking down the street carrying beer and you say) Are you going to a party?
Do you think it'll rain tomorrow?
(Shop assistant to customer) Did you want to try on that jacket?
"Where's Mike?" "He'll be in the pub, that's where he always is at this time on a Friday"

It seems to me that the only justification anyone can give for saying there's an inevitable link between tense and time is "because the book says so". Books, even highly prestigious ones, can be wrong sometimes. Academics don't always know best.

Incidentally, please don't get the idea that I ignore the fact that English speakers talk about the Future. We do, we just have many ways of doing it depending on what kind of future we're talking about. The same can be said of our varied ways of talking about the present and the past.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 6:53 pm

I think even in English we can agree that tense is a grammatical category used to refer to time and other things.

Also, to complicate things, we have tenses such as the Present Perfect Continuous, which is the tense used to express the simultaneous application of the Perfect and Continous aspects to the Past tense

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 12:49 am

The relationship between tenses and the time they represent in a sentence may well be complex. This is no excuse to murder the word. If time and tense are delinked then tense only represents grammatical form. If people wish to say that different verb forms have no relation to time, or may represent time or something else entirely, then that is at least conceptually clear.

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 8:34 am

It's not that the tense bears no relation to time, as time may iften influence the choice of tense. What the examples above show is that the relationship is not a direct one.

Take the example of leaves in the sentence above. The time reference comes from the context, not the verb form. The verb form is appropriate in both cases because of the time being referred to, although The bus leaves in five minutes could just as easily have been re-written will leave or is going to leave. Time influences the verb forms we can use, but crucially it does not dictate them.

Duncan Powrie · Post by **Duncan Powrie** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 9:10 am

lolwhites wrote:Time influences the verb forms we can use, but crucially it does not dictate them.

Try telling that to those who'd like to dictate what tenses we use according to their understanding of time.

Duncan Powrie · Post by **Duncan Powrie** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 10:08 am

Hmm I should perhaps have written "...THEIR understanding...", or "their 'understanding'..." etc.

The fact is (like it or not!), how people (plural!) actually use tenses reflects their (plural!) implicit understanding of time.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 12:50 am

But when you say "the bus leaves in five minutes" you are quoting a regular action from a timetable. You are not going to say it about a hippy bus you are travelling on with your druggy friends in the middle of the sahara.

To dig a little for these things always seems to me to be a simpler matter than Lewis-type systems which are supposed to make all the problems fly away.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 7:18 am

It is perfectly reasonable to tell your friends to "hurry up beause the bus leaves in five minutes" in the situation you allude to.

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 9:24 am

What's wrong with saying My hippy druggie friends set out for their trip across the Sahara some time tomorrow? How about Danny La Rue is in town tomorrow for one night only? They're both one-off future time events described using the "present tense", not regular actions.

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 11:53 am

In most of the examples when it isn't a case of "The train leaves at 7.oo today (same as tomorrow)", that is to say in the case of one-offs, I hear an echo of a diary or an itinerary:

My hippy friends set off........

This year Xmas falls on a Saturday.

Danny La Rue performs in the West End next week.

The one befuddled dope-fiend who has got himself together enough to prod his pals into action has something of the above in what's left of his brain. "Come on guys, we leave in five minutes. "

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 12:31 pm

Hey maaan! Let's get down to Danny the dealer before the dope supply runs out

Another "present tense with future reference" which is not necessarily regular. Whether or not it is depends on the speaker's drug habit.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 6:28 pm

Bad example that last one. "before it runs out" is the same kind of subordinate clause as "if it runs out", or "when the queen arrives".

Incodentally, and irrelevantly, you would use the present subjunctive in Spanish.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Wed Oct 27, 2004 12:34 am

No, unless there was a secret nazi on the happy hippy bus, the situation just wouldn't arise.

Anyway, clearly we can use a present tense for a future situation anytime we have something resembling any kind of schedule. We can use "will" too, if we want. If we don't use "will", it's just a kind of futurish version of the "historic present tense", but one which has become the normal convention.

Not a clean and beautiful explanation, but one which remains easier to understand than setting the words free of their moorings.

Xui · Post by **Xui** » Wed Oct 27, 2004 3:33 am

lolwhites wrote: Try the following exercise which I regularly give to my students:

Take the following sentences and put them into groups depending on what time they refer to:
1) NOW
2) BEFORE NOW
3) AFTER NOW
4) DON'T KNOW/OTHER

I guess it is a good exercise. As the time is shifting, any action can be expressed by any kind of tense:

1) The bus is leaving now.
2) The bus will leave within five minutes.
3) Sorry, the bus has left.
4) Do you know the bus will leave soon?